The effect of magnetic interactions is a key issue for the performance of nanoparticles in magnetic fluid hyperthermia. There are reports informing on beneficial or detrimental effects in terms of the specific power absorption depending on the intrinsic magnetic properties and the spatial arrangement of the nanoparticles. To understand this effect, our model treats a simple system: an ensemble of identical nanoparticles arranged in an ideal chain with the easy axis of the effective uniaxial anisotropy of each particle aligned parallel to the chain. We study the magnetic relaxation of linear chains with low anisotropy in magnetic-fluid-hyperthermia experiments, a system that yields a larger hysteresis area than the noninteracting case (i.e., improved specific power absorption) for all orientations of the chain (even in the perpendicular configuration and the randomly oriented case). The most-favorable case is the chain parallel to the external field; however, we show that the incorporation of a dipolar-field component perpendicular to the external field is necessary for the correct modeling of chains nearly in the perpendicular configuration, which is not always done. The mechanism involved in the hysteresis-area increase can be interpreted as a shift between the local field and the applied field.

Magnetic fluid hyperthermia (MFH), the procedure of raising the temperature of tumor cells using magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) as heating agents, has proven successful in treating some types of cancer. However, the low heating power generated under physiological conditions makes necessary a high local concentration of MNPs at tumor sites. Here, we report how the in vitro heating power of magnetically soft MnFe2O4 nanoparticles can be enhanced by intracellular low-dimensional clusters through a strategy that includes: a) the design of the MNPs to retain Néel magnetic relaxation in high viscosity media, and b) culturing MNP-loaded cells under magnetic fields to produce elongated intracellular agglomerates. Our direct in vitro measurements demonstrated that the specific loss power (SLP) of elongated agglomerates (SLP=576±33 W/g) induced by culturing BV2 cells in situ under a dc magnetic field was increased by a factor of 2 compared to the SLP=305±25 W/g measured in aggregates freely formed within cells. A numerical mean-field model that included dipolar interactions quantitatively reproduced the SLPs of these clusters both in phantoms and in vitro, suggesting that it captures the relevant mechanisms behind power losses under high-viscosity conditions. These results indicate that in situ assembling of MNPs into low-dimensional structures is a sound possible way to improve the heating performance in MFH.